-at-arms, or
peasants, they concern us not. Maybe, while we are questioning
them, a party of those we are in search of may be traversing some
other road. Let us be riding forward."

He roughly pricked his horse with his spur, and the troop rode on.

"I think you are wrong to be so impatient, Louis," the one who had
acted as interrogator said. "Anyone could see, with half an eye,
that those two fellows were, as they said, old men-at-arms. There
is a straightness and a stiffness about men who have been under the
hands of the drill sergeant there is no mistaking; and I could
swear that fellow is a Gascon, as he said.

"But I am not so sure as to one of the young fellows with them. I
was about to question him, when you broke in. He did not look to me
like a young peasant, and I should not be at all surprised if he is
some Huguenot gentleman, making his way to Nerac with three of his
followers."

"Well, if it was so, Raoul, he will not swell the queen's army to
any dangerous extent. I am glad that you didn't ask him any
questions; for if he declared himself a Huguenot--and to do them
justice, the Huguenots will never deny their faith--I suppose it
would have been our duty to have fallen upon them and slaughtered
them; and though I am willing enough to draw, when numbers are
nearly equal and it is a fair fight, I will take no part in the
slaughter of men when we are twenty to one against them. Three or
four men, more or less, at Nerac will make no difference. The Queen
of Navarre has but some fifty men in all and, whenever the orders
come to seize her and her son, it may be done easily enough,
whether she has fifty or a hundred with her.

"War is all well enough, Raoul, but the slaughtering of solitary
men is not an occupation that suits me. I am a good Catholic, I
hope, but I abhor these massacres of defenceless people, only
because they want to worship in their own way. I look to the pope
as the head of my religion on earth, but why should I treat as a
mortal enemy a man who does not recognize the pope's authority?"

"That is dangerous doctrine, Louis."

"Yes, but why should it be? You and I were both at the colloquy at
Poissy, and we saw that the Cardinal of Lorraine, and all the
bishops, failed totally to answer the arguments of the Huguenot
minister Beza. The matter was utterly beyond me and, had Beza
argued ten times as strongly as he did, it would in no way have
shaken my faith; but I contend that if Lorraine